Anyway, one popular approach to tackling spam is to rely on a managed filtering service, or a hosted anti-spam solution. What are the merits of a hosted anti-spam solution, you ask? I posed this question to Joel Abramson, VP of Business Development over at Greenview Data, who operates a hosted anti-spam service aptly called SpamStopsHere.

Below are four reasons why Abramson considers a hosted solution to be superior. The comments are mine:

Less maintenance

I suppose this makes perfect sense - what with no hardware upgrade or software patches to apply or download for a hosted anti-spam solution. All an SMB needs to do is an initial configuration of their mail systems to pipe all incoming e-mails directly to their hosted filtering service of choice. And that's it - no maintenance is required once that's done.

Keep viruses as far away as possible

While it is unlikely that malware-infested e-mails that are already identified will be clicked by accident, it makes intuitive sense not to have any form of viruses on your computer if it can be helped.

Higher reliability

Assuming you run your own mail server, the use of a filtered e-mail service should help ensure that e-mails will not be lost if your SMB's mail server experiences an outage. This is because cleansed e-mails are typically processed using a "store and forward" methodology. What it means is that e-mails will be safely "stored" by your hosted anti-spam solution provider until your mail server comes back online.

Protects bandwidth

This is an important benefit that is not apparent unless one is familiar with how e-mail works in conjunction with DNS. Essentially, the "forwarding" of e-mails to any hosted anti-spam solution is achieved by modifying the MX record for the domain of your SMB. The result is that all e-mails to your domain will be delivered directly to your service provider. What this translates to is a reduction in the consumption of bandwidth by your mail server, since the spam mails would already have been removed from the incoming e-mails.

Do you have any experiences, both good or bad, with hosted anti-spam services? Feel free to post a comment here or drop me an e-mail.

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Greenview Data, Inc is a privately-held company that excels in enterprise anti-spam, anti-virus, email archiving and file conversion products and services. The company's anti-spam product, SpamStopsHere was heralded as "the most accurate hosted anti-spam solution available" by Network Computing Magazine.

Another huge benefit we noticed of using a hosted spam service, was that a large amount of the avaerage server's resources were released for other purposes. Most of my customers are SME and run Small Business Server. Normal email security software running on those servers can get so busy defending from spam that the servers get tied up and unresponsive. Moving the filtering to the cloud largely fixes that.

We were so impressed by this and all the other reasons you have stated that we negotiated a deal with our providers and labeled the service under our own brand and now distribute that worldwide thru the franchise we belong to.

The hardest problem we have with the service, is the ignorance of DNS providers about DNS and MX records. Ring them up to get a customers MX record changed and they have no idea. Seems weird as DNS is how the whole internet works, these guys provide DNS services, yet their help desks wouldn't have a clue.

Have you come across many cases where servers running multiple services have become choked up and become responsible due to spam?

On the ignorance of DNS "providers" on modifying the MX records, I'm not really surprised. Since many of them could be small outfits with just sufficient knowledge to put Web servers on the Internet. Then again, you are probably also speaking to front-line helpdesk staff and changing of "MX records" is not in their FAQ or phone script.

Way cool! Some very valid points! I appreciate you. penning this article plus the rest of the website is really good. Thanks for your insight! I have tried the Dedicated Server in Australia and having a Dedicated Hosting really is beneficial.
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